- ‘I only kneel before God’: The last words of priest killed in Myanmar
Two women who witnessed the murder of Father Donald Martin Ye Naing Win in Myanmar last week recounted how the priest “fearlessly confronted” the armed men who took his life.
In a statement to the pontifical news agency Fides, the two witnesses — who are teachers and parish workers at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in the village of Kangyi Taw — said that when some 10 militiamen, “clearly intoxicated or under the influence of drugs,” encountered Ye Naing Win, they ordered him to kneel.
“I only kneel before God,” the priest calmly replied to the leader of the armed men. He then proceeded to ask them: “What can I do for you? Is there something we can talk about?”
Immediately one of the men struck Ye Naing Win from behind with a dagger that was still in its sheath. However, with this blow he also accidentally hit the leader of the armed group. Already in a drunken rage and because of the answer given to him by the priest, the leader pulled out a knife and began to stab him “repeatedly and brutally in his body and in the throat.”
2. Missing Children Among the Many Victims of Ukraine War
The Catholic Church in Ukraine is working with Rome to try to document and help thousands of children in eastern Ukraine who have been taken by Russian authorities into Russia during the three-year war between the two countries, Ukraine’s Catholic primate told EWTN News.
“Those children has been beaten, even tortured,” said Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the Catholic patriarch of Kyiv-Halych, during an interview with EWTN News In Depth broadcast Friday, Feb. 21.
“We have to be aware that those children, the most vulnerable persons, they are experiencing the biggest disregard or biggest jeopardy in that situation,” he said.
Many of the children who have subsequently returned to Ukraine are showing signs of emotional trauma, he said.
“They are silent for months. We have to really commit to rehabilitating these children,” Archbishop Shevchuk said in the interview, which was conducted in both English and Spanish. “Can you imagine children taken from their relatives? The imprisoned children. My heart really hurts a lot.”
3. Carter Snead & Yuval Levin: On IVF, Trump’s team should proceed with extreme caution
Before moving forward with any concrete measures to promote in vitro fertilization, Trump’s team should carefully study all … concerns in their full complexity — safety of mothers and babies, the current absence of meaningful regulation, widespread ethically questionable practices of the in vitro fertilization industry, and the risks to uniquely vulnerable people longing to be parents as well as to their children at every stage of development.
Most importantly, in its deliberations, the Trump team should hold in its collective mind that the animating purpose of all of these efforts is to build a world in which all children are protected, welcomed and loved unconditionally as the gifts they are.
After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.
- Leah Libresco Sargeant: 5 Things President Trump’s Executive Order on IVF Gets Wrong
- Naomi Schaefer Riley: Why Long Island is hoping former cops will become child services investigators
Arizona, for instance, hired 120 detectives to work with CPS several years ago. (The state’s child protection agency was led for a time by a former homicide detective.) And in 2018 some members of New York’s Administration for Children’s Services were being trained in investigative techniques and safety by the NYPD. It was a positive development, but does not seem to have continued. Still, all of this work could be done further upstream. Why not provide a track in criminal justice programs or police academies for people who are interested in child protective services?
More and more child welfare agencies think that their responsibility is promoting “family well-being” or fixing racism or rehabilitating parents. But, first and foremost, the public expects them to protect children. Hiring a few people with experience in law enforcement is a first step to rediscovering that mission, but we could do better.
7. Riley: More Girls Than Boys Are Using Fentanyl. What Is Going on in the Lives of These Girls?
Now it seems that drug use has become more of an isolated phenomenon. Reports about cannabis use, for instance, describe kids using in the morning before school to ward off anxiety. If drug use is being used more frequently as a coping mechanism for mental illness, it is not surprising that girls are using more. According to a 2021 CDC survey, which included data from more than 17,000 students, “57% of teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless in the past year — a nearly 60% increase from 36% in 2011. In contrast, 29% of teen boys reported feeling this way in 2021, an increase from 21% in 2011.”
The reasons teens use drugs is changing, which means the population of teens using drugs is changing. Using illegal drugs is obviously a problem no matter who is doing it and why. But the fact that they are doing it to cope with depression and anxiety is particularly, well, depressing. Teens should be enjoying their lives, and if in the past they used drugs because they wanted to see how much more enjoyment they could squeeze out of their social interactions, that’s a very different problem than teens using drugs to handle day-to-day living.
And girls using drugs face particular vulnerabilities that should also make us worry about this trend. In her bestselling memoir “Lit,” Mary Karr writes about one of the first times she was offered drugs as a teenager while she was on the road in California with some friends. On a beach in California, a young man named Ken offered her acid. “When I told him I didn’t have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for doing drugs in Texas?” And you realize that Ken is looking for something very specific from this transaction.
13. Leor Sapir: The Corruption of The New England Journal of Medicine: A leading medical journal has capitulated to transgender activists.
14. Model Legislation to Restrict Smartphone Use in K–12 Public Schools
New Yorker Rose Girone, who celebrated her 113th birthday on Jan. 13 and was believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor, died on Monday morning.
The cause, according to her daughter, Reha Bennicasa, was old age.
Girone — who ran a knitting shop in Forest Hills, Queens and credits the craft as helping to save her family during the Holocaust — was, by all accounts, a remarkable person, and was well-loved in New York’s knitting community. Girone was also outspoken about her experiences during the war; she provided testimonies to the USC Shoah Foundation, the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County and others.
“Everything that’s out there is really who my mother was,” Bennicasa said, referring to the press coverage her mother received in recent years. “She was a strong lady, resilient. She made the best of terrible situations. She was very level-headed, very commonsensical. There was nothing I couldn’t bring to her to help me solve — ever — from childhood on. She was just a terrific lady . . . and I don’t know, when God made her, they broke the mold.”